BET's Unsung Cofounder Sheila Johnson Is Making Her Mark On The Film Industry

Sheila Johnson and her then-husband Robert Johnson made history in 1979 when they launched Black Entertainment Television — the first cable TV franchise targeting African Americans — building it into what Forbes then called “the premiere medium for reaching the U.S.’ 35 million African-American consumers.” In 2001 the Johnsons sold BET to
Viacom in an all-stock deal for $2.9 billion including debt. The couple got divorced the following year.

Sheila Johnson, 66, a former BET board member, vice president and host of the network’s talk show Teen Summit for 11 years, now criticizes what BET has become. “I really believe that African Americans have lost their voice. That’s why you’re seeing what you’re seeing in the general mainstream media. There’s not that area where we can come together and really talk about a Ferguson [Missouri] or talk about what’s going on in the police community and all the racial turmoil. BET was supposed to be that voice. And we don’t have it,” she says during an interview at the sprawling 340-acre Salamander Resort and Spa in Northern Virginia she owns.

Johnson says it was her disappointment in BET’s current programming that led her to sell all of her Viacom shares. Cash from the share sales makes up a large portion of her estimated $700 million net worth. She’s used some of the money to fund such ventures as a hotel management firm, stakes in three D.C.-based professional sports teams (the NBA Wizards, the NHL Capitals and the WNBA Mystics) and a private jet charter service.

Johnson — ranked No. 22 on Forbes new list of America's Richest Self-Made Women — is also using her money and influence to give rise to the voice that’s missing, funding critically acclaimed documentaries and films featuring African American voices. She was the first investor in Lee Daniel’s The Butler, the critically acclaimed 2013 movie that followed a former slave’s rise to working in the White House. After reading The Butler script three times, Johnson put $2 million into the production, and then said she wanted to lead the rest of the fundraising, soliciting prominent African American philanthropists and celebrities.

Pam Williams, one of The Butler’s two initial leading producers, says Johnson’s energy gave her hope that the film would be made after many Hollywood studios turned the movie down because they thought it would not do well in the box office, and particularly overseas. “We really didn’t have a studio champion in Hollywood. We needed passionate people less focused on the bottom line and more focused on getting a movie like this out there,” Williams recalls.

The Butler turned out to be a relatively big success, staying at the top of the box office for three weeks in a row and pulling in roughly $200 million. Now, Johnson is looking to recreate that scenario: She and The Butler producer Williams have begun working on several other projects together. One is a T.V. miniseries they are in the early stages of creating, which will be based on a forthcoming book detailing Thurgood Marshall’s appointment to the Supreme Court. (“My dream director would be Ken Burns,” Johnson says.) They’re also currently pinpointing other projects to start developing, including the story of the Reagan-era, cadillac-driving “Welfare Queen” who stole multiple identities to increase her benefits.

Johnson has come a long way in her journey from a childhood marked by some struggles to her current entrepreneurial status. Johnson’s father was one of just 11 African American neurosurgeons in the country when she was growing up. He had trouble finding work in a field dominated by white doctors. Johnson said her family was pressed for money, and she sometimes made pot holders to sell door-to-door for 2 cents a piece. Her father ended up finding a post within the Veterans Administration hospital system, and her childhood was marked by constant moves across the country.

As a child, she was fair-skinned and when she moved with her family to Louisville, Kentucky in the early 1950s — before desegregating schools was federally mandated — her parents devised a plan to better her education: Enroll her in an all-white school. For the entire year of third grade until the family moved again for her father’s job, her darker-skinned mom couldn’t pick Johnson up from school because her skin would have set off racist alarms. “The only thing I remember is them telling me to keep my mouth shut and to do my work,” recalls Johnson.

After moving many times, the family settled in Maywood, Illinois for her fifth grade. The school district required every student to play an instrument, and she took up the violin. She would later become the first African American woman to be the chair at the high school all-state competition. The violin served her well: She secured a full scholarship to the University of Illinois to study music, where she was the only African American in the department, and was also the first African American cheerleader at the university.

It was at the University of Illinois that she met her future first husband, Bob Johnson, the ninth of ten children from a working-class family in Illinois. Sheila and Bob got married after graduation and later settled in Washington, D.C. where he worked as a lobbyist for the cable industry and she taught music at a prestigious private school, making $7,200 a year, she said. She also kept her eye out for other opportunities, and was cast for a 20-minute part in a play in which she had a role as a prostitute named Candy. That job made her three times her annual teaching salary — enough for the couple to buy their first home.

Funds were tight in 1979 when she and Bob co-founded BET. As the network looked to get off the ground, the money Sheila was making from teaching private music lessons helped fund the early stages of the business and other needs the growing family had — the couple adopted a child soon after launching BET. (Her ex-husband declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Though she didn’t start out as an executive at BET, she says she signed for the company’s first loan and she was also one of three original board members. Her contributions to the company, such as envisioning educational programming and securing grants to keep talk show Teen Summit running despite low interest from advertisers, she says, have been glossed over. “The men get all the credit for everything. We get airbrushed out of their lives,” she says. “I think that more than anything the perception out there was that I did nothing: That I just sat home and ate bon bons and did nothing but helped the family grow financially or emotionally, and that I think was the most painful part of all.”

Early on, media investor John Malone, then chief executive of cable TV firm Tele-Communications Inc. (known as TCI), became BET’s first investor, taking a 35% stake on behalf of
TCI for $500,000. Malone, who sat on the BET board for 18 years, says in a phone interview that he remembers Sheila being “extremely articulate and well-educated.” Recalling the early years at BET, Malone says, “Those were moments and experiences I look back very fondly on. It was a great experience building BET with Bob and Sheila.”

After years of working at BET during the day while her children were young and teaching music lessons in the afternoon, Sheila joined BET full-time as vice president for corporate affairs in 1990. The next year, the Johnsons took the company public as the first African American-controlled company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. They took it private in 1998 for $1.3 billion. When they sold BET to Viacom, the Johnsons netted $1.5 billion for Bob’s 63% stake.

Sheila says the sale helped empower her to become financially independent, which in part led to the couple’s 2002 divorce. After securing a large chunk of the couple's Viacom shares in the divorce settlement, she took two years to figure out what her next move would be. Now, among hotels and other ventures, she has found her cause. “It’s champions like (Johnson) who put their money where their mouths are and say, ‘I’m going to keep funding African American voices and T.V. shows,’" says the Butler's producer Williams, "and hopefully she’s not alone in that.”